As an author of Now Dock it was around late of November that I felt Now Dock to have reached its pontential as an internal plasma panel and plasmoid. At the same time @audoban author of Candil Dock reached me and pinged me to do something rare in the open source communities… and that was, combine our projects. Combine Candil’s fundamental philosophy of a standalone dock living outside plasmashel with Now Dock’s familiar interface for the dock and use only kde and plasma libraries in the process. That was enough for me to decide that the change worthed the effort. Time passed and in every step I am more than happy with that decision.At this point I would like to thank a lot @audoban for the fantastic achievements, discussions and cooperation we achieved all this time we interact through the project!!! My girlfriend of course for her patience and support during the last development cycle!! :) and a big thank you to the many fantastic users, translators and enthusiasts that use the project through the master branch and are helping us discovering bugs very early, pointing us in new directions and becoming persistent when something is very important from a user point view and not that much from the developer’s one !!! :)

THANK YOU!!

You are the blood of the project without which a body becomes cold….

The new project was called Latte Dock and the artwork and logo of course were created by the majestic @varlesh!!! :)

"...a plasma dock that provides an elegant and intuitive experience for your tasks and plasmoids..."

"Art in Coffee"

I think you had enough of my chattering around the history of the project :), let me outline some of the most important features:

Standalone executable outside plasmashell

Meaning
that in the rare case of crashing your plasmashell, your panels will
still be there to interact with, and of course the other way around

Single configuration window to rule them all

there
arent two different windows anymore, offering various choices for the
user, one for plasma and one for the dock. The configuration
window combines
all the user choices in one
place.

- single config window -

- visibility modes -

Five different visibility modes

Dodge
Active: avoid always the active window

Dodge
Fullscreen: avoid always the fullscreen window

Dodge
Windows: avoid every window

Auto
Hide:auto-hide after a timer interval

Always
Visible:the dock will be always visible

- timers -

Hide / Show Timers

specify
the timer intervals for showing or hiding the dock

Docks manager

Latte
is not a single dock but rather a dock manager. You can have as many
dock instances you want around your screen..

- four Latte instances ;) -

Multi screen

Latte
offers a new experience for your docks concerning your multi screen
setup. A dock can be set always On Primary screen or
always at an Explicit Screen.

On
Primary: your
dock will always move
around your screens
based on which screen has been set primary at each time. In the case
of an explicit dock occupies that specific edge in that screen the
explicit dock gets the advantage.

On
Explicit:
your dock will be activated only when that screen is present at your
system. Meaning that if
you connect your laptop at work at a specific screen over there, each
time you connect it that dock will appear and in no other case.

added
intelligence: concerning
the above design decisions Latte trys to follow some rules. It will
never leave you without at least one dock having the tasks latte
plasmoid in it.

- robust multi-screen support -

Proportional Applet Size

Latte offers a setting for Always on Primary Screen. So your favourite dock will follow you between different screen resolutions. In such cases you can set the applets to be a percentage of the screen height instead of specific size in pixels. So your dock it wont just follow you but it will automatically update its size on resolution or screen changes.

Simplify working states and
provide only normal and editing state

normal
state:the user can interact with tasks and applets and can add launchers
and applets from the official plasma widget explorer

editing
state (when showing the configuration window):
the user can add/move/delete applets and config Latte

- import/export -

Import/export settings

Your settings are always available
if you create backups and of course the users can share their different configurations!! So a user can create configurations for
Unity, Plasma, Gnome layouts and share them with the community

- Unity layout -

- Plasma layout -

- My favourite ;) -

Make your docks look like and behave like plasma panels

With Latte we can easily adjust the appearance of the dock to make it look like a plasma panel and of course behave as such concerning snapping, visibility etc...

- plasma looks, an Always Visible Latte dock instance -

- auto positioning -

Occupy space based on the real
free screen space

Latte
offers various alignments for your applets, Left,
Center, Right, Fill (all
three). Top
and bottom
docks gain the priority to fill the screen and left
and right
ones will try not to leave free space if it is not needed… Unity
paradigm is set very easy and it is auto adjusted...

Notice: for these calculations dock’s
maximum length set by the user is used e.g. 90% of screen and not the
current running size of the dock.

- alternative session -

Alternative Session

Sometimes the way you organised your panels is not sufficient. You are travelling or you
just want an alternative layout for specific cases. Switch to your
alternative session and organize your work at your preference. Welcome the Alternative Session, a fully functional secondary state!

Support plasma 5.8 and provide
transparency and blur out-of-the-box

In
Now Dock a special produced plasma theme was needed from plasma 5.8
in order for the dock to gain its transparency. This works directly
now without needing from the user to do anything around that.
Transaparency/Blur/Background
Contrast Kwin Effects are used directly.

Execute Latte and you are ready to
go.

Notice:
For cases that the user does
not like the transparency provided from the plasma theme, the user
can also choose
from the Latte settings, a solid background to be used instead

- kwin blur effect -

Experimental support for alternative desktop environments

Even though we didnt focus on supporting alternative desktop environments a test showed that there is no such barrier. Watch out a Latte Dock with plasma plasmoids and full plasma frameworks stack inside MATE ;). At the bottom-right corner you can notice the hidden MATE panel.

- Latte Dock inside MATE -

All features of Now
Dock are already supported

Latte
is not trying to break your previous Now
Dock
workflow but rather to make your life easier concerning panels. It
trys to make
that happen with an elegant and
beautiful way, not
a disturbing one. The familiar interaction concerning launchers in
different activities, window previews, shadows, different coloring
for different states etc are already present…

Τhank
you all for being part and making
possible this fantastic community called KDE!!!! ;)

Hey, this looks really awesome also really appreciate the joint efforts!However I'm not able to install it here:Add Widgets -> Get new Widgets -> Download new Widgets: "Latte":Install: v0.6.0.tar.gz: "installing"-> ok and then?

Hi, thanks a bundle for Latte-dock! Really great and outstanding work! I love its smooth integration with Plasma. Thank you for your dedication and sharing!!I'd like to use a single runnig dock without icons of running apps but I didn't manage to run Latte without the plasmoid indicating running apps.Furthermore I'd love to get the windowslist applet in full length but it only shows all (minimized) windows in a shortened way and without text.Any hints?

For testing purposes i added one more 'Latte plasmoid' to the dock. This seems identical to the first: indicating running apps and impossible to delete via GUI. Now i have two of those i wished to wipe from the dock ;-)Maybe the right way to delete it is via ~/.config/lattedock-appletsrc? But how?

To clarify what i aim at: my goal is to have 2 docks, -one plasma panel ORE-one latte dock exactly like plasma panel (only if 'windows list applet' will be convinced to behave like his sibling in the plasma panel) AND-an additional latte dock without 'latte plasmoid' that is without an indicator of running apps